


Somehow myself survived the Night

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, F/M, Fluff, Sleep, chaperone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 03:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10069838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: They'd only stopped when they had run out of everything.





	1. Chapter 1

“Shall I give you an order then, as your commanding officer?” Jed asked, managing to infuse the words with something resembling wit despite the brutality of the past thirty-six hours. Or perhaps it was thirty-seven, Henry couldn’t recall. Still, they were both standing and alert enough to converse, while Emma was fast asleep tucked up in the corner of the bench that stood in the back hallway. Her face, exhausted even in her sleep, was pillowed on one hand, and the line of her neck against her tumbled chignon reminded him of Ayres' farm. It seemed a lifetime ago and yet he could still feel her soft, chapped lips, how shockingly eager she had been for him. The War had brought them together, parted them and now held them like shy partners in a country dance. It was the War, Antietam, that brought them together now, nearly a trio, having done what they could for the men and boys half-destroyed by the battle. Henry had found him standing in front of Emma, unable to walk away, unable to wake her or carry her to her room. The older man had quickly divined his dilemma but was slower than usual to offer a sensible solution.

“I don’t believe you can order me to carry a young woman to her bedroom, Jed,” Henry replied. He rarely considered his commission, a chaplain first and last, and none other than McBurney had ever used his rank. Jed gave him a half-smile and Henry was struck again by how fatigued the man must be, no sleep and near-constant surgeries over the past three days as they tried to slow the procession to St. Peter.

“Damn,” Jed cursed, but without any ire or bitterness. It was barely a transgression given recent events, though once Henry would have recoiled to hear such language. “Not even in extremis?” Jed added, tilting his head towards Emma.

“This could hardly be considered life and death,” Henry said. Emma shifted, murmured something unintelligible. She was safe and healthy, her sleep would be restorative, and she would wake to straighten her collar and tend the boys, a comrade if nothing else. Jed glanced at him, then ran a hand through his ruffled hair, rubbed the back of his neck.

“She’s going to regret sleeping there in the morning, for all it’s only a few hours away,” Jed replied. “And it’s unnecessary, Henry. If there was a woman about, if Mary-” he added, pausing after he said her name, Nurse Mary who was never very far from his thoughts, who would have helped Emma to her room, even to a more comfortable chair in the officers’ parlor but who now was making a slow recovery in Boston.

“I should hate anyone to think I was taking advantage, for Miss Green to think it,” Henry said.

“Well, you needn’t. No one would, no one will. And if it’s what you require, I’ll chaperone you to her door. Now, will you?” Jed said, half-bemused, half-exasperated, laying a conciliatory hand on Henry’s arm. Henry nodded and stepped over the bench, easing his hand behind her back and beneath where her knees were bent, picking her up. It should have felt awkward—he had never held her this way, Jed Foster watching them both with an atypical gravity, his own body aching from the hours of hard labor, but instead it was effortless, entirely natural. Emma nestled her face into his shoulder but her eyes stayed closed. She was warm against him and he felt the loveliness of her shape, looked down to see the delicate line of her cheek, the bridge of her nose, her lips parted as she breathed easily. Despite the hour, the desperate days of work, she carried the scent of rosewater about her and he thought she looked like a little white rose in his arms.

“I’ll bring up the rear,” Jed offered “There isn’t room to walk two abreast.” It was not quite true but Henry didn’t argue. He turned and climbed the stairs, each step the opposite of a demand upon him, strength returning to him even as he heard Jed sigh, not only with fatigue, a sigh that would not be answered by the voice he wished for. The older man stopped a few paces from Emma’s door, the room that had once been Mary’s.

“You are a man of God, honorable—you can see her safely settled. I can’t—I can’t go in that room,” Jed said and made no explanation. Henry looked at him and saw the man’s age and care on his face, in his posture, knew how little it would have affected him if there had been a Yankee Baroness waiting in any room in the hospital.

Henry laid Emma down on the bed. It was neatly made and he didn’t want to wake her to get her under the covers. The night was warm enough. He took off her slippers, wondering that she had not worn sturdy boots but glad of it. There was a shawl at the foot of the bed and he drew it over her, brushed back the strands of dark hair that had come loose at her crown. He would not risk a kiss, his unshaven whiskers might be too rough against her fair skin, but he let himself say what he wanted, what she would not hear when the sun shone.

“Good night, angel. God keep you safe.”


	2. Chapter 2

Emma woke blushing. It had not been a dream—she knew that without any doubt, not because he had left her any message in the way he’d covered her with the shawl Alice had discarded, the neat pairing of her worn Morocco leather slippers, but because the strange logic of the War dictated that it would have been Henry who found her asleep as she had not meant to be, Henry who would not let her be the cynosure of the staff at daybreak, her neck aching from the rude bed she’d made. And because her body told her, reluctant to relinquish the sensation of being carried very gently and very carefully through the halls, the scent of him a fragrance she clung to, everywhere his hands had touched blessed and wanton. She recalled his voice in conversation, threaded through her dreams like the ribbon in her chemise, and how she had wanted to open her eyes when he put her down, to reach up her two arms to him but had been too tired to do anything but retreat back into the night. She had dreamt of him sitting down beside her, combing out her hair with his hands, loosening all her clothes so she could shrug them off like a courtesan her single silken robe, of coaxing him to rest beside her even if she might only face his broad back and kiss the nape of his neck and no where else. She dreamt of reconciliation without forgetting, that he could accept both their sins—his of action, hers of being witness, of loving him still without the least revulsion. She did not dream of laughter or joy, of some world where they found themselves without their pasts but still enough themselves to want to embrace. She woke blushing from a dream of solace, of feeling his face damp on her shoulder while she urged him on, showing him how she might contain anything and transform it, the goodness of their coupling beginning in flesh but instantly echoed, redoubled within their mingled souls. She lay alone in the bed and knew they would both be disappointed when they met; she was not an angel.


	3. Chapter 3

Henry was too young. He had not lost enough which was why he walked out of the room after a few minutes. Had he ever tasted the transfiguring joys of a woman’s body? Was it all yet a remote fantasy, needing the sanction of a solemn minister to allow him any enjoyment, had he learned only the delight of the first kiss, the hand clasped, the glance deliberate, shy, yearning? He had needed such encouragement, such reassurance that what he wanted, to carry sleeping Emma to her bed, to settle her, was permissible. He worried too much about the world and not enough about the soul though to tell him would be an injury he clearly couldn’t bear; Jed knew what it meant to love a woman and hurt her, had made promises too many times he hadn’t kept, hadn’t wanted to keep, would have done anything to keep but what was necessary. He knew the body and the soul, the mind, the spirit; he knew delight and anguish, abandonment, rejection, remorse, desire. It had taken him forty-five years, but he had learned what love meant and sacrifice, dreams and what it took to make them possible if not true. They might still be there together, that still tableau, Henry tall, his coat black in the night, the rusty stains obliterated, Emma a testament to God’s infinite ability in making loveliness, if he had not urged his friend to act, to pick up the girl, the woman he loved with the obvious entirety of his pure heart, and take her to bed. To bed—to rest. Jed knew what he would have done if it had been Mary, how Henry would have waited in the hall, uncertain, the door to the room closed, only silence without, within. He would have fallen asleep to the sound of Hopkins’ footsteps retreating, Mary in his arms. The moonlight would have been broken on the floorboard by her bodice, her petticoats, muslin and wool bleached by night to one singular color. The taste of her bare skin would have been in his mouth and they would have shared their dreams without any prior discussion; they would have solved the equation of the Chesapeake together and woken to find her lips on his, his hands at her hips, her dark eyes watching his and knowing everything. He would not have wasted the chance, having wasted the chance, this one and that, having disappointed her, having felt her soul work so hard to cling to her body when the fever raged, having heard her beg and remembering how he how wept in her lap, pleading with her. Emma slept alone and Henry walked out. There was no way to tell him to go back in, to sit in the chair beside her and watch her face, the way her color would rise with the dawn, to discover the expression in her eyes when she saw he hadn’t left. He could not order the man into her bed, the proper ceremony to follow the marriage. He could not think what else he could have done or said; the woman who could was alone, in Boston, with only his letter and not his hand to hold.

“Come now, you need to sleep,” he said. 

They all needed rest, whatever they could get. They would have to muddle through their dreams as he did, sending his soul on a voyage every night to a room he had never seen, with a view of the harbor. It should be easier, to be close, though he hadn’t found it so before Mary left. It should be easier except that they made it hard, because they didn’t realize what grief would be when they’d chosen it. In the day, Henry would try to forget the endearment he’d chosen and Emma would refashion the smile she had for the chaplain for every sick boy, as Mary had cut down her ruined ballgown.

**Author's Note:**

> Weren't we due for some fluff? Harder to write it for Phoster with Mary away and ill, so I decided to help out the Emmry folks. The title is from Emily Dickinson.
> 
> Sorry, chapter 2 got angsty :)


End file.
